Sakthy Selvakumaran receives IET Achievement Award 2017

Sakthy Selvakumaran receives IET Achievement Award 2017

Sakthy Selvakumaran is one of 5 Postgraduate scholarship winners at the IET Achievement Awards 2017.

With rapidly changing climate and environment, and increased risk of threats such as flooding, it is critical to find new technologies to help prevent failures and collapses and increase resilience of our cities.

The widespread deterioration and recent collapses of bridges, dams, tunnels and other key services have highlighted the importance of structural monitoring as a tool to aid infrastructure asset owners and managers. Sakthy's work aims to use satellite remote monitoring technologies to minimise the risk of such failures.

Sakthy says: "Predicting vulnerability of infrastructure via satellite observation gives us an opportunity to prevent the deterioration and collapse of bridges, dams, tunnels and other key services. The use of such remote technology enables us to access difficult to reach assets, and take measurements at greater frequencies than traditional visual inspections can provide, as well as gain insights which may not be collected by traditional inspection and sensor monitoring. With rapidly changing climate and environment, and increased risk of threats such as flooding, it is critical to find new technologies to help prevent failures and collapses and increase resilience of our cities."

Sakthy graduated with an engineering degree from Cambridge in 2010. She has since worked as a civil and structural engineer in design consultancy and contracting applications across multiple roles, continents and cultures (including UK, Peru and Spain) before returning to academia to undertake her PhD.

This scholarship will enable her to spend time with the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Germany. Sakthy will collaborate on a project on earth observation to predict vulnerability of buildings and infrastructure by processing imagery collected by the TerraSAR-X satellite.